Fascination For Scholars Research Articles

American Machiavelli: Alexander Hamilton and the Origins of U.S. Foreign Policy, and: The Many Faces of Alexander Hamilton: The Life and Legacy of America's Most Elusive Founding Father (review)

American Machiavelli: Alexander and Origins of U.S. Foreign Policy. By John Lamberton Harper. (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2004. Pp. xii, 347. Illustrations, Cloth, $30.00.)The Many Faces of Alexander Hamilton: Life and Legacy of America's Most Elusive Founding Father. Edited by Douglas Ambrose and Robert W. T. Martin. (New York, NY: New York University Press, 2006. Pp. x, 299. Cloth, $45.00.)Reviewed by Kevin M. GannonGiven current deluge of books about The Founders-their virtues, relationships, honor, public lives, private lives, accomplishments, legacies, scandals, duels, and seemingly anything else Founder-related-it is appropriate to ask whether this burgeoning literature really needs two more volumes about Alexander Hamilton. Numerous critics have characterized surfeit of books about as Founders chic a fad that serves only to obscure much of wider and more meaningful aspects of early republic's history. Yet still they come, and people still buy them. Clearly there is an abiding interest in Revolutionaryera elite that seems unlikely to wane any time soon. But criticisms associated with pejorative Founders chic are, in cases, salient. Books on founding elite run real risk of focusing so narrowly upon a small (albeit disproportionately powerful) group of individuals (almost always men) as to eclipse thoughts, ideals, motivations, and actions of other 99 percent of population. question is one of balance. founding elite was made up of powerful men, and their ideologies and actions had a profound influence on public sphere that belied their small numbers. But they did not operate in a vacuum, and paying attention to this reality is factor that defines better, and more worthwhile, treatments of founding elite.The two volumes under review here fall into that category. For a number of reasons, Alexander has become a figure of fascination for scholars and wider public. His advocacy of an active and powerful government in face of locally oriented opposition speaks directly to tensions between liberty and order central to American polity, then and now. His significant (some would argue dominant) role in shaping foreign policy and defining U.S. international interests resonates loudly with current concerns. His Caribbean background and cosmopolitan worldview seem to render him in, but sometimes not entirely of, Founding elite. These two volumes-one a partial other a collection of essays stemming from a conference on Hamilton-address many faces of Alexander and facets of his impact upon a diverse array of fundamental issues involved in shaping of early republic.Diplomatic historian John Lamberton Harper says that there is still room for valuable work on Hamilton; indeed, he asserts, the new literature, like old, is mostly hostile or partisan (2). (It should be noted that Harper's work slightly antedates Ron Chernow's biography, which is neither of those.)1 While Chernow's work is meant as a comprehensive life-and-times treatment of its subject, Harper's primary (though not exclusive) focus is on Hamilton's role in shaping and implementing foreign policy for infant American republic. Where Harper's study is truly original is in its explicit paralleling of and sixteenthcentury Florentine politico Niccolo Machiavelli. According to Harper, Hamilton and Machiavelli, father of continental realism, inhabited same moral and intellectual world, one where emerging states had to adapt themselves to law of jungle and look to successful models to survive (5). two shared remarkably similar views on human nature, politics, and statecraft, as well as a personal set of visceral likes and dislikes; in particular, they deplored 'middle path' (5). comparison is suggestive not only because of similarities Harper identifies-though they are quite striking-but also due to each man's particular context. …

Bellini, Giorgione, Titian, and the Renaissance of Venetian Painting ed. by David Alan Brown, Sylvia Ferino-Pagden (review)

REVIEWS 185 lated into Venetian pictorial dialect” (44). Examples of the half-length Madonna, the Bellini brothers’ favored type, are discussed to further exemplify this Veneto-Byzantine style, while Cretan icons of the Madre della Consolazione type are briefly contrasted as representatives of what Byzantinists would call Creto-Venetian style. Campbell is right to notice that, even though Greek and Venetian painters had different reasons for merging each others’ distinctive styles—commercial concerns or the close association Europeans made between Byzantine art and sanctity—it is not clear if any devotional distinction existed in the actual use of the emerging images (59). Unfortunately, discussions of the examples included in the catalogue do not move far beyond an all-too-familiar discourse, limited to identifying whether a painting is “Latin-inspired” or “Byzantine-looking.” Like the exhibition, the catalogue aims to blur the east versus west dichotomy , where western art is often artificially elevated. Written (in most part) from a western perspective, however, this catalogue proves how difficult it is to escape the modern borders of scholarly fields, even while looking at artists and patrons who themselves, over 500 years ago, managed to synthesize brilliantly the quintessential values of their cosmopolitan Mediterranean reality. The Italian images of Mehmed II suggest that, despite religious concerns, he admired European art and actively constructed a European image for himself. He requested established artists from various Italian courts and commissioned medals and painted portraits glorifying him as a successor of Alexander the Great. At his court, Greek scholars and bureaucrats worked alongside their Muslim peers. However, J. M Rogers and Alan Chong show that, even though Mehmed’s library and art collection joined cultures, his successors did not share his tolerance towards the occident, and thus his patronage was less influential than perhaps he might have expected. Chong’s essay, “Gentile Bellini in Istanbul: Myths and Misunderstandings,” is one of the strengths of the catalogue, disentangling the intricacies of Gentile ’s eastern visit. A close analysis of the artist’s few works securely dated to his Istanbul period clarifies their chronology and attribution. Last but not least, the artist who preceded Bellini at the Sultan’s court in 1478–1479, Costanzo da Ferrara, is firmly identified as Costanzo di Moysis. Little is known about this Italian, originally from Venice but active in Ferrara and Naples, whose oeuvre cannot be reconstructed in the absence of stylistic evidence. The second half of the fifteenth century marks the height of Italian fascination with the east. It was a period of explosive cultural dialogue—one that continues to stir our scholarly fascination today. The exhibition curators and the authors of this catalogue were successful in presenting Gentile Bellini as a case study, offering a reconsideration of an artist who, during his lifetime, was considered Venice’s most important painter. CRISTINA STANCIOIU, Art History, UCLA Bellini, Giorgione, Titian, and the Renaissance of Venetian Painting, ed. David Alan Brown and Sylvia Ferino-Pagden (Washington DC: National Gallery of Art 2006) 336 pages, 31 halftone + 162 color ill. This substantial, abundantly illustrated catalogue, created to accompany exhibitions at the National Gallery in Washington and the Kunsthistoriches Mu- REVIEWS 186 seum in Vienna, brings together some of the foremost scholars of Venetian art to shed new light on a significant moment in the history of Venetian painting. The exhibitions highlighted a period of considerable stylistic change in the painting of the Venetian schools from 1500 to 1530. The exhibitions and the catalogue were meant to illustrate this transition by bringing together the paintings of not only the three masters listed in the title, but also other lesser-known painters of the beginning of the sixteenth century like Lorenzo Lotto, Cima da Conegliano, and Vincenzo Catena. The catalogue brings together these artists seamlessly, creating for the reader a vivid picture of the artistic world of early sixteenth-century Venice. By not concentrating on a single artist, as many exhibitions do, the catalog presents a more complete idea of artistic development in all genres of paintings. Few scholars of Venetian art would doubt the significance of the three decades chosen by the exhibition organizers in the history of the city’s painting. During these thirty...

The Origins of Southern Evangelicalism: Revivalism in South Carolina, 1700–1740

Despite the continuing “discovery of southern religious history” and the growing scholarly fascination with southern intellectual and cultural history, historians of the South have devoted all too little attention to the origins of southern evangelicalism in the colonial period. Over the past thirty years or so, they have generally tended to follow the lead of Samuel S. Hill, Jr., arguably the single most important and influential southern religious historian, who concluded in an interpretive survey article that “the history of religion in the South before it was the South … is, in all candor, not very impressive.” In his pioneeringReligion in the Old South, for instance, Donald G. Mathews paid but scant attention to the origins of popular Protestantism in the South during the middle decades of the eighteenth century. What is more, he focused almost exclusively on colonial Virginia.

VIOLENCE AND CIVILITY IN EARLY MODERN EUROPE

Violence in early modern Europe, 1500–1800. By Julius R. Ruff. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001. Pp. xii+269. ISBN 0-521-59119-8. £13.95.The London mob: violence and disorder in eighteenth-century England. By Robert Shoemaker. London: Hambledon and London, 2004. Pp. xvi+393. ISBN 1-85285-389-1. £25.00.Outlaws and highwaymen: the cult of the robber in England from the middle ages to the nineteenth century. By Gillian Spraggs. London: Pimlico, 2001. Pp. x+372. ISBN 0-7126-6479-3. £12.50.The duel in early modern England: civility, politeness and honour. By Markku Peltonen. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003. Pp. x+355. ISBN 0-521-82062-6. £45.00.Swordsmen: the martial ethos in the three kingdoms. By Roger B. Manning. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003. Pp. xvi+272. ISBN 0-19-926121-0. £47.00.Rebellion, community and custom in early modern Germany. By Norbert Schindler, translated by Pamela E. Selwyn. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002. Pp. xiv+311. ISBN 0-521-65010-0. £55.00.The history of violence appears to hold a particular fascination for scholars of the early modern period. This is not least because it is so often deemed integral to the differences between modern and pre-modern culture and politics, despite the fact that this particular difference is becoming increasingly difficult to sustain. The progressive decline and containment of violence – or at least certain forms of violence – has been central to narratives of state formation, the transition from courtesy to civility, a shift from aristocratic to bourgeois cultural hegemony, and the ‘civilizing process’ first theorized by Norbert Elias. Despite Michel Foucault's complication (if not rejection) of their teleological assumptions, such celebratory accounts of modernization have proved remarkably tenacious, albeit in a fragmented fashion. As the selection of books under review here illustrates, with the exception of Manning and, most notably, Peltonen, current scholarship is more likely to uphold, or to modify subtly, rather than to reject entrenched views of a gradual abeyance of violence in early modern Europe in response to imperatives of civility and politeness and to emergent state control.

Ricardian rents or Knightian profits? More on Austrian insights on strategic organization

How firms pursue strategies that take advantage of time-specific opportunities, such as whether to enter an industry during an upturn or a downturn, is one of the great unexplored themes of strategic organization. The interesting feature of such strategic issues is that they arise only in conditions of disequilibrium. In such conditions the usual arguments utilized in strategy discourse, namely whether firms are capturing rents or not, provide little traction. This essay is concerned to explore such an issue and its implications for strategy reasoning and strategy research. While neoclassical economic orthodoxy is firmly focused on what happens at equilibrium, the Austrian tradition by contrast is concerned with disequilibrium, and specifically with the market process through which firms move towards an equilibrium position. As such, the Austrian tradition in economics continues to exercise, quite rightly, a fascination for scholars of strategy (Jacobson, 1992; Foss, 1994; Phelan and Lewin, 2000; Roberts and Eisenhardt, 2003). Most recently, Roberts and Eisenhardt (2003) compare Austrian insights for strategy with those from prevailing approaches to strategic organization. They argue that the competitive forces framework that relies on ‘a logic of positioning in relatively stable markets’ or the resource-based view, which relies on ‘a logic of resource leverage in incrementally changing markets’ may miss important features of modern business reality that are associated with market turbulence, uncertainty and disequilibrium. They suggest as an alternative to these established approaches an approach to strategy that relies on ‘a logic of sensing and seizing opportunities in turbulent markets’ in keeping with the tenets of Austrian economics and entrepreneurial dynamics. Their message is simple: the Austrian economic approach has much to offer strategy in that it provides a fresh view of the market as a process in disequilibrium, where real strategizing in conditions of uncertainty takes place. STRATEGIC ORGANIZATION Vol 4(1): 97–108 DOI: 10.1177/1476127006061034 Copyright ©2006 Sage Publications (London,Thousand Oaks, CA and New Delhi) http://soq.sagepub.com

Making Avonlea: L.M. Montgomery and Popular Culture (review)

Reviewed by: Making Avonlea: L.M. Montgomery and Popular Culture Cecilia Morgan Making Avonlea: L.M. Montgomery and Popular Culture. Edited by Irene Gammel. Toronto: University of Toronto Press Inc., 2002. Pp. xiv, 348, illus. $70.00 Making Avonlea is the result of both editor Irene Gammel's longstanding interest in L.M. Montgomery's relationship to Canadian culture and of a widespread scholarly fascination, in Canada and abroad, with Montgomery and her work. Originating from a conference held in 2000 at the L.M. Montgomery Institute at the University of Prince Edward Island, this collection of essays explores both the meanings and manifestations of Montgomery and her most famous characters, Anne and Emily of New Moon, in a wide variety of genres and locations. Twenty-three authors have contributed to this book; most of them write from either the discipline of English, with a specialization in Canadian literature, or from interdisciplinary perspectives, such as gender studies and cultural studies (which includes film, television, drama). One essay comes from music history. There also are pieces that are as much reflections on the more personal, material, and sometimes embodied meanings of 'Anne' and Montgomery to these authors' lives (for example, Tara Nogler's essay on working in a Japanese theme park, performing Anne) as they are academic work. L.M. Montgomery and Canadian popular culture, the authors of Making Avonlea argue, are compelling and significant topics for both scholarly and popular communities. Making Avonlea is divided into three parts: Avonlea's cultural weight and Avonlea as iconography; Avonlea on film and television and as music and drama; and Avonlea as tourist landscape. The first section deals primarily with Montgomery, Avonlea, Anne, and Emily in literature and spans the late-Victorian and Edwardian decades and selected periods in the twentieth century; its authors consider topics as diverse as Montgomery's visual imagination, the meanings of hair in Green Gables, international images of Emily, and the controversy over English professor Laura Robinson's paper on lesbian desire in Green Gables (given at the Congress of the Humanities and Social Sciences, Edmonton, 2000). Part two explores the treatment of Montgomery's novels in Kevin Sullivan's television adaptation (at both 'macro' and 'micro' levels); the role of the Disney Corporation in Sullivan's Road to Avonlea series; CBC's Emily of New Moon series; Paul LeDoux's play, Anne of Green Gables; and the music of Elaine and Norman Campbell, Don Harron, and Mavor Moore's long-running musical. Part three looks at the construction of 'Avonlea' as a tourist site, both in its geographic manifestation in Prince Edward Island and as an imagined terrain and community that is [End Page 634] recreated elsewhere, whether in Japanese theme parks and clubs or in electronic discussion groups around the world. As Gammel points out in her introduction, there is no one 'unified thesis' or particular approach that underpins the book. While all of this work is written from feminist perspectives, it also represents a mixture of other theoretical approaches to understand the formation of Avonlea as an imagined community in its cultural manifestations (including Mikhail Bakhtin, Pierre Bourdieu, John Fiske, Chandra Mukerji and Michael Schudson, Dawn H. Currie, and Angela McRobbie). Many of the essays point to, though, the shifting boundaries between 'high,' 'middle,' and 'low' cultures that Montgomery's work and its subsequent iconography illuminates, although with a few exceptions they do so in ways more contemporary than historical. Furthermore, Making Avonlea illustrates another boundary, one that has been constructed to neatly divide the personal, subjective, and local from the 'academic,' objective, and national. A number of these scholars identify with Montgomery's work on both these levels, often simultaneously, and see that identification as a source of strength, not weakness. While I find this approach intriguing (for while historians do so as well, they usually are not so honest about it), it has its pitfalls, for it can lead us to focus more on the poetics and less so on the politics of cultural production. While some authors consider issues of race, ethnicity, and representation (for example, Christopher Gittings in his essay on both the original and the television version of Emily), the...

Chicago's Pragmatic Planners

Chicago is amythic city. Its representation in the popular imagination is varied and has included, at various times, the attributes of a blue-collar town, a city in a garden, and a gangster's paradise. Myths of Chicago “grow abundantly between fact and emotion,” and they selectively and simultaneously evoke and defer attributes of the city. For one perduring myth, social scientists may be held largely responsible: namely, that Chicago is “one of the most planned cities of themodern era,” with a street grid, layout of buildings and waterways, and organization of its residential and commercial architecture that reveal a “geometric certainty” (Suttles 1990). The lasting scholarly fascination with Chicago's geography derives in part from the central role that social scientists played in constructing the planned city. In the 1920s,University of Chicago sociologist Ernest Burgess worked with his colleagues in other social science disciplines to divide the city into communities and neighborhoods. This was a long and deliberate process based on large-scale “social surveys” of several thousand city inhabitants.Their work as members of the Local Community Research Committee (LCRC) produced the celebrated Chicago “community area”—that is, 75 mutually exclusive geographic areas of human settlement, each of which is portrayed as being socially and culturally distinctive.

On the Emergence of Memory in Historical Discourse

WELCOME TO THE MEMORY INDUSTRY. In the grand scheme ofthings, the industry ranges from the museum trade to the legal battles over repressed and on to the market for academic books and articles that invoke as key word. Our scholarly fascination with things memorable is quite new. As Jeffrey K. Olick and Joyce Robbins have noted, collective memory emerged as an object of scholarly inquiry only in the early twentieth century, contemporaneous with the so-called crisis of historicism. Hugo von Hofmannsthal used the phrase collective memory in 1902, and in 1925 Maurice Halbwachs's Social Frameworks of argued, against Henri Bergson and Sigmund Freud, that is a specifically social phenomenon. But outside of experimental psychology and clinical psychoanalysis, few academics paid much attention to until the great swell of popular interest in autobiographical literature, family genealogy, and museums that marked the seventies. 1 scholarly boom began in the 1980s with two literary events: Yosef Yerushalmi's Zakhor: jewish History and jewish (1982) and Pierre Nora's Between and History, the introduction to an anthology, Lieux de me'moire (1984). Each of these texts identified as a primitive or sacred form opposed to historical consciousness. For Yerushalmi, the Jews were the archetypal people of who had adopted history only recently and then only in part, for modern Jewish historiography can never replace an eroded group memory. For Nora, was an archaic mode of being that had been devastated by rationalization: speak so much of because there is so little of it left. Despite or perhaps because of their elegiac tone and accounts of as antihistorical discourse, these works found an amazing popularity and were quickly joined by others. In 1989 the translation of Nora's influential essay in a special issue of this journal and the founding of History and Memory, based in Tel Aviv and Los Angeles, showed the crystallization of a self-conscious discourse. A decade later the scholarly literature brims with such titles as Sites of Memory or Cultural Memory or The Politics of Memory. 2 emergence of as a key word marks a dramatic change in linguistic practice. We might be tempted to imagine the increasing use of memor as the natural result of an increased scholarly interest in the ways that popular and folk cultures

Hirbet Hizah: Between Remembrance and Forgetting

The questions what, how, and when we remember remain a source of fascination for scholars. They remain among the most elusive and complex to define. Collective memory is situated at the divide between the conscious and the subliminal, between acknowledgment and denial, between history and psychology. Currently in vogue is the conception of the "usable past": collective memory as a construct, a product of national-cultural manipulation that seeks to entrench in memory those portions of the past useful for invigorating the imagery of the society's self-identity and fostering its vital current interests and agendas. That conception repudiates the notion that there are spontaneous, unintentional processes at work as collective memory crystallizes. If we attach conscious intent in shaping memory and its construction, then who are its agents? What are their tools? Moreover, in democratic states--and, arguably, in other states too-- there is never one single source of inspiration and guidance. How does the open arena of conflicting interests affect memory's configuration? When is a particular event stamped, indelibly or temporarily, in memory? What processes catalyze its fixing, what forces act to submerge its recollection? If the "usable past" ministers to interests in the present, then what is the fate of those segments of the past that do not serve the [End Page 1] society's current agendas? Are they doomed to oblivion? Or is there a constant dynamic reciprocity between the past and the present, manifested in memory's transformations, not necessarily due to some template imposed from above--but rather to changing circumstances as they affect public consciousness?

Slavery and Slaving in World History: A Bibliography, 1900–1991. By JOSEPH C. MILLER. Millwood, NY: Kraus International Publications, 1993. Pp. xvii + 556. $90 (ISBN 0-527-63660-6).

This mammoth volume is yet another milestone in Joseph Miller's continuing survey of the ever more extensive writings on slavery around the world. From a working bibliography for a university course, this undertaking has expanded and blossomed to become this wonderful research tool for scholars, with 10,344 entries. The pervasiveness of slavery in human history is becoming ever more apparent, bringing out the peculiarity of the twentieth century. The listings include secondary scholarly works directly relevant to slavery and written from the perspective of any discipline. The framework is basically geographical by enslaving nation. The major problems here is the category ‘Muslim’, which might more fruitfully have been broken up into its constituent geographical entities. Asia, which always accounted for a far larger number of slaves than the Americas, is under-represented, in part reflecting scholarly coyness about this delicate topic. The entries are not annotated, but there are two lengthy indices, for authors and for subjects. The emphasis is on works in English, with a partial representation of writings in major West European languages. Despite these restrictions, the task is reaching the limits of the book format, as the fascination of scholars with this subject shows no sign of abating. Future editions will perhaps need to be available only in electronic format.

Conceptualizing Bourgeois Revolution: The Prewar Japanese Left and the Meiji Restoration

That the Meiji Restoration marked Japan's proruption as a modern industrial nation-state has become a commonplace among those who study Japanese political history. The event may lack the romantic drama and mythology of the French revolutionary upheaval of almost a century before, yet the Restoration has remained a source of fascination for scholars seeking patterns in the events that transcend national boundaries to form the seamless web of human history.

Einstein in Spain: Relativity and the Recovery of Science by Thomas F. Glick

TECHNOLOGY AND CULTURE Book Reviews 179 Discovering is sprinkled with errors and debatable assertations. Examples of the former are: Bell Telephone Laboratory scientists before the AT&T breakup did not have almost complete research freedom (p. 12); it is Donald, not William, Beaver (p. 40); to denigrate U.S. education, Root-Bernstein asserts (p. 43) that most U.S. Nobel prize winners were trained overseas, but a count for physics discloses only nine such out of fifty-three. R. W. Wood was an American, not a British, scientist (p. 94); Davy did not make the 1840 statement on page 155, as he had been dead for many years. To gently knock T. S. Kuhn, the author reports that “someone” discovered he used para­ digm in 150 different ways; Masterman merely found 21 different usages. In 1939 there was no universal dogma on “the inviolability of atomic structure” (p. 402). Not only had scientists worked out a number of natural radioactivity decay series, but in 1932 Cockcroft and Walton at the Cavendish accomplished the first successful artifi­ cial transmutation. At the time of this writing Barbara McClintock is alive, contrary to page 403. It is to Root-Bernstein’s credit that the text does not end with some simplistic prescription for successful discovering. Instead, there is a full menu, perhaps contradictory in part, certainly somewhat unclear as to what program is being recommended. I like to think that the author, despite his vast self-assurance even when outside the areas of his own research, is intuitively reacting to what is the only lesson of good history: that the past is at least as complicated and as murky as the present. Nathan Reingold Dr. Reingold is senior historian at the National Museum of American History. Einstein in Spain: Relativity and the Recovery of Science. By Thomas F. Glick. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1988. Pp. xiii + 391; illustrations, appendixes, bibliography, index. $42.00. The comparative study of the acceptance of scientific theory and its influence on culture and society was not a new subdiscipline even in the days of J. T. Merz. But during the past few decades it has been cultivated with increasing energy, and some nice results have ap­ peared. Even with respect to the relatively narrow case of the national reception of (or objections to) Einstein’s theories of relativity, there now exists a substantial corpus from the pens of many scholars, including Stanley Goldberg (starting with his pioneering dissertation comparing cases of Germany, France, Britain, and the United States), Michel Biezunski (France), Loren Graham (Britain and the USSR), Barbara Reeves (Italy), and J. M. Sanchez Ron (Britain), among many others. 180 Book Reviews TECHNOLOGY AND CULTURE Thomas F. Glick’s book, Einstein in Spain: Relativity and the Recovery ofScience, is a fine addition to this shelf. On one level, it is a thorough account of the events, personalities, and publications attending Ein­ stein’s triumphant two-week trip to Spain in February—March 1923—a trip not without its share of grotesque and hilarious mo­ ments, as was also the case for his other voyages. But the main achievement of this book is to show how, both during Einstein’s visit and in its aftermath, the person and his scientific message became, as it were, a prism that refracted, and separated out for detailed study, the complex set of strains in the cultural and political life of Spain. From one moment to the next, one could not have predicted which group or faction, coming from which part of the whole spectrum, would attempt to attach itself to Einstein or reveal itself in hostility. Einstein and his science become tools for analyzing the agents and trends of his time. Anyone who has had the chance to work in the Einstein Archives knows this to have been true wherever Einstein went: the voluminous set of correspondence and other records of interactions have become the veritable eyepiece of an optical instru­ ment through which one glimpses a large part of our century in a new way. This surely accounts for some of the continuing fascination of scholars with this figure. Einstein arrived in Spain at an opportune point in history, just about...

The Evolution of Southern Culture

The American South has long been a subject of endless scholarly fascination. Historians and social scientists have endeavored to decipher the enigma of the region and to identify the formative factors that have molded the southern experience.They have searched for a central theme that would explain southern behavior and have debated the extent to which the region was distinctive from the rest of the nation. More recently, historical scholarship has shown a growing interest in the evolution of southern culture and the forces that shaped it.The southern enigma is yet to be fully deciphered, but The Evolution of Southern Culture addresses questions crucial to an understanding of the region's history. The book brings together original, searching essays by nine of the nation's most distinguished scholars: Immanuel Wallerstein, Eugene D. Genovese, Elizabeth Fox-Genovese, Eric Foner, Nell Irvin Painter, George M. Frederickson, Joel Williamson, Bertram Wyatt-Brown

The American Slave Narrative: The Justification of the Picaro

IF well begun is half-done, a bad start can also mean a bad finish. Beginnings establish a momentum that later stages tend to continue or at least need to confront. Hence the appropriate fascination of scholars with origins-of culture, political movements, personality development. Our sense of beginnings is always colored by our sense of the ending, or of the middle if no end has been reached yet. Neither terminal point exists without the other; if the child is father of the man, our sense of the man shapes our view of his childhood. Nowhere is this reflexive relationship more evident nor more complex than in the study of black American culture. Did that culture begin in slavery's negation of African culture, so that the black American can only be understood by reference to an identity he has lost and knows he no longer has? Or did it begin in some creative interplay between cultures, so that the black American is truly an AfroAmerican, not deprived of culture but endowed through his painful experience with a rich amalgam of his old and new worlds? The relatively negative explanations of these origins, from Ulrich Phillips down through Stanley Elkins and beyond, have grown out of a relatively bleak sense of the black American's current state, just as the more positive interpretations of the I96os and I970S-Genovese's, Gutman's, and Levine's,1 to name just a few-owe a good deal to a different view of black Americans today. Most studies of black American culture have concentrated on its oral aspects-folk tale, music, religion-because they have seemed most distinctive. But the question of the origin of written expression

Patron—Client Relations as a Model of Structuring Social Exchange

The study of patronage and of patron-client relations has come lately to the fore in anthropology, political science and sociology, and has exerted a great fascination for scholars in these spheres. From a topic of relatively marginal concern it has become a central one, closely connected to basic theoretical problems and controversies in all the social sciences.

The Old Anarchism and the New-Some Comments

ANARCHISM AS A DOCTRINE HAS A PECULIAR FASCINATION FOR scholars. It both repels and attracts. It attracts because it embodies rage – the particular rage people have when they see man as an obstacle to his own humaneness. It is the ultimate statement of how outrageous the human condition can be. But it is precisely because man does not live by rage alone, but must master it by discovering proximate means to solving the ordinary problems of daily life, that anarchism repels. It seem a romantic luxury at best – a cry of pain for the future, just as nostalgia is for the past and, like nostalgia, this cannot fail to be attractive.Perhaps because of this anarchism is not a mere reflection of anger but also a contributing source. It is thus more than a lightning rod for the anger that exists. Anarchism is associated with unreason and bombs, violence and irresponsibility.